Art Therapy Online

Editorial

2021-03-17T12:45:07+00:00

Here in the UK the NHS is, as might be expected, very much in the news, and the threat of the world-wide pandemic, as our readers will know, has affected all our practices, exposing inequalities, economic, political and social failures, which demand attention. This volume of the journal, produced under the shadow of our contemporary anxieties, addresses the imperative of the present situation. The contents of this issue reveal aspects of the current contexts in which art therapy practitioners, artists, trainers, students and researchers, are exploring experience, developing new practices and creating fresh understanding.

The Art and Practice of Providing On-line Art Therapy to Children during the Covid-19 School Shutdown

2021-03-17T12:45:04+00:00

This paper describes the author’s experience of providing on-line art therapy for four months via Zoom during the school closure in Spring 2020, necessitated by the spread of Covid-19. The author describes how the shift in working style led to a change in the dynamic of the art therapy which brought benefits including the need for the client to take greater responsibility for facilitating the sessions and a renewed engagement with the art work. Despite this, anxiety in the therapist grew as the loss of the artwork and the art room led to a fear of a failure of the container and also that important transference and communication was being lost. Despite new dynamics and a shift in the work seen with several children, the quality of the connection was reducing over time as fatigue, complacency and boredom set in. The benefits to the changes could only be fully realised once we had returned to in-person art therapy and overall the author was left with the sense of her practice being compromised and reduced by the need to work in isolation. She did, however, benefit from the opportunity to reflect in depth on isolation and her responsibilities as therapist.

Covid-19 Creativity or Collapse

2021-03-17T12:45:02+00:00

A few days before lockdown, a service user I was working with took their own life, it was the final shocking act of a long, painful, irresolvable journey for us both and I was shaken to the core of my identity as an art therapist and in many ways as a human being. Perhaps in some way this made the total shut down of ordinary life more bearable. The clocks had stopped for everyone with the collective shock of Covid, and I needed some time to think, read, reflect, and grieve.

The Breath and the Line: an art therapist’s subjective account of drawing through illness

2021-03-17T12:45:00+00:00

On the 22^nd March 2020, on the eve of the National Lockdown, I sat down to a meal with my family; mid-way through the meal I started to feel strange.

Covid 19: a personal reflection

2021-03-17T12:45:13+00:00

Looking around my small cosy living room which is unusually clean and tidy I sit on my sofa and look out of gleaming patio door windows onto a recently mowed lawn and neat garden borders. My beloved brown terrier snuggled in his basket is gently snoring. The sun is shining, there is not a cloud in the sky and the birds are singing. From this vantage point, to the unknowing eye everything appears ‘normal’ but of course nothing is ‘normal’ or ever will be again.

Keep Your Distance: Covid-19 creativity or collapse

2021-03-17T12:44:58+00:00

It is standard practice to begin academic articles by problematising a question. What, exactly, do we mean by the term ‘creativity’? To what, precisely, does the word ‘collapse’ refer?

Covid-19 or Collapse: A Note

2021-03-17T12:45:11+00:00

It is autumn 2020 now, following more than 16 weeks in a total lockdown last spring. Then hopes, more lockdowns, closed borders, and dreams that Covid-19 would be treatable soon. In week one of lockdown, I began the Art Therapy at Home Project - with 12 at risk primary school children.

Nest Suspended: artwork and poetry in response to Covid-19

2021-03-17T12:44:56+00:00

‘Nest Suspended’ is an artwork I felt compelled to create in response to Covid-19 global pandemic. As an experienced art psychotherapist living and working in Sydney, Australia, practising since 2004, this artwork provided the much needed container to help process and makes sense of some of my inner and outer experiences, as private and public worlds were turned upside down and inside out.

Lament

2021-03-17T12:44:53+00:00

This ‘Lament’ is presented as a concrete prose poem addressing the loss of in person sessions and the move to the online platform during the covid-19 pandemic. The chiasm literary structure has been used to format the words of the ‘Lament’ in an archaic form and to present language and thoughts in a way that challenges our perceptions of the ways we read text and picture online. The work of Riley, Lemma and J. J. Gibson have been introduced to help frame beginning thoughts on what it means to be working with another in an art therapeutic context online.

Keywords: Lament, chiasm, intersubjectivity, loss, online, virtual

Therapeutic Self-Portraiture: finding a sense of self during the Pandemic

2021-03-22T20:49:18+00:00

With the beginning of the pandemic regular mode of living and doing things have significantly shifted from familiar to unrecognisable. For months we have been unlearning to trust the touch of our loved ones, and even our own skin. News flooded in often confusing us with contradicting information and overwhelming data. The infection curve had become an inverse graph of our mood – when it went up our mood collapsed, when it started to decline – we gained hope. Symptoms were appearing and disappearing making it difficult to listen to our own body – is it a bit of a sore throat or something worse? Adaptation in a world under constant change has never been an easy task, however, trying to function under the permanent threat of contamination has rendered that challenge wearing.

Creativity as a Lifeline: connection through witnessing

2021-03-18T11:11:00+00:00

The weekly Accountability Art Project was the product of a chance meeting at an art exhibit to honor Doris Arrington, the founder of the art therapy department at Notre Dame de Namur University. The conversation revealed a common theme that each of us were noticing – a lack of personal art making. The project began as accountability art: a pledge, between three art therapists, to complete one piece of art per week.

Anchored Together in the Storm

2021-03-17T12:44:48+00:00

During the pandemic (since March 2020 and ongoing) I have attended weekly online large groups. Large groups give us the opportunity to explore cultural, political and social matters.

Mandated Measures: seismic shifts in the discipline and training of art therapy

2021-03-17T12:44:44+00:00

Confronted by catastrophic circumstances, such as the complexities instigated by COVID-19 and the global pandemic, art therapists naturally interpreted this as an opportunity to effectively evidence their resiliency, innovation, compassion and, indeed, their creativity. This article prioritises the practice and training of art therapy, and explores how the unprecedented circumstances we currently find ourselves in have needed the discipline to evolve in ways that ensures the continuation of the overall integrity, best practices, ethics, and expected standards. This discourse champions the art in art therapy by highlighting creativity as a core tenet of this resilient discipline.

Keywords:

COVID-19, arts-based response, art therapy, art therapy training, Singapore

Unifying Multiple Roles during Lockdown

2021-03-17T12:44:41+00:00

This reflection highlights my experiences navigating through a lockdown in Singapore, which we analogously termed as a “circuit breaker”. Ironically, it was a time where many of our daily functions had to continue over electronic means. We also had to spend most of our time at home because of the social distancing measures. The use of devices and teleconferencing tools surged during the circuit breaker and people remained connected, if not more so than before. Like many others, I had to be acquainted with Zoom to carry out my roles and responsibilities, and spent most of my days in my room, on my computer, switching between these roles. The following discussion is a reflection on the discoveries I made during this new routine

Transformation: training in the pandemic, an emerging art psychotherapist’s perspective

2021-03-17T12:44:39+00:00

Covid-19 has changed every aspect of society (Unicef, 2020; Wellcome, 2020). In this essay, I hope to describe what it has been like for me to enter Art Psychotherapy training during the pandemic. I will highlight how the profession and the training providers have shifted to meet the needs of emerging Art Psychotherapists when everyone is faced with the challenges that this period brings. As a first year student at the University of South Wales, I explore some of the obstacles and benefits of training during this exceptional time. Is it possible to feel hopeful, experience transformation, and enjoy the changes in education at a time of great social upheaval?

Presentation Review: Civilization and the Discontented by Christopher Bollas

2021-03-17T12:45:09+00:00

A message from Los Angeles – the city of angels. Angels visit humans at times of crucial intervention and this YouTube presentation by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas certainly had an impact on my understanding of our current situation of potential collapse in the time of neoliberalism, climate change and the virus Covid-19. He may be familiar to art therapists through his book ‘The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known’ (1987), which explores some of the non-verbal aspects of human experience through an object relations lens.

Book Review: Making Sense by Martin Stanton

2021-03-17T15:46:24+00:00

Are we being taken for a ride? Certainly. Stanton audaciously unzips and spills the traditions of radical psychoanalytic thought into the here and now, unleashing lines of flight from the vital forces of art, dream, humour and imagination into the therapeutic enterprise. Creating an ‘incessant carnival of insane and inspired improvisation’, (Chesterton 2007 in Beaumont 2020 p131) the book travels from the proverbial sublime to the ridiculous, but it is absolutely no joke. By taking the risk of ‘joining a lineage of great works which mix up abstractions fit for an epic with fooleries not fit for a pantomime’ (Chesterton 1909 in Beaumont 2020 p131) Stanton provides food for thought, puzzle and inspiration which will be welcomed by all therapists who are trying to make sense of a world that is increasingly out of order.

Book Review: Affect in Artistic Creativity – Painting to Feel by Jussi A. Saarinen

2021-03-17T12:44:34+00:00

Most Art Therapists and Art Psychotherapists have a belief in the healing qualities of the media. It is a shared article of faith that creative material processes, of themselves, can promote the development of health and stability. Nevertheless, we also know that the relation to the material element is not without hazard. This is a problem for us, I think, because we can never be certain about the relationship between a service user, or client, and the physical material she manipulates. In terms of the relation that the other has to substance and process, we are always on the outside.

This book by Jussi A. Saarinen, who is a psychologist and a post-doctoral researcher in philosophy, explores the painter’s relationship to painting, the ‘experience itself’ (2021: 1. italics the author). Saarinen stresses that he is not concerned with expression but with what painters feel ‘because they paint’ (2021:1). His book is essentially a carefully constructed argument, which engages with philosophical literatures, psychoanalysis, recent cognitive theory and interviews with artists, in support of the proposition that: “Painters paint to feel.” (2021: 1. Italics the author).

Book Review: Inventing Transgender Children & Young People. Edited by Michele Moore and Heather Brunskell-Evans.

2021-03-17T12:44:31+00:00

With eloquence and clarity, this book is troubling in its account and convincing in its argument. It describes and explores how the idea of the ‘transgender child’ has come into being, and asserts that even when there is a strong presentation of gender dysphoria, the safeguarding of children and young people from bodily intervention is paramount.